Word: benders
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...great hunt began when Namo and I awoke on the floor of someone's house somewhere in Vermont. We had been on a bender; that much was clear. Namo smelled of gin, I smelled of bourbon, and all around us on the floor were Strangers. Who were these people? No matter. Some past folly, no doubt. I looked at Namo. He was awake...
Spock, Captain Kirk and McCoy are a distant second to the prospect of black holes [Sept. 4]. What a mind bender! But gee, after all, black holes have a lot of pull in high places...
...life could inspire brilliant satire. Whether they could inspire tragedy remained in doubt until Julia Markus addressed herself to the theme of growing up Jewish in Jersey City. Tragedy requires the decline of a hero, and Markus has invented one-however low key-in this somber, eloquent novel: Irving Bender, the son of East European Jews for whom the immigrant dream of success had come to nothing. "Irv's father drank and gambled and died," she writes in her terse idiom. "The mother got along; she got along. Education was life to his mother...
Mindful of this injunction, Bender quits school and goes to work so that his indolent brother Babe can have a college education. But Babe is fated to fail in business, while Irving succeeds as a bootlegger during the Depression and later as the owner of a summer camp in the Poconos. Surrounded by unpleasant, thwarted people-his troubled niece, his grasping, self-pitying mother-Bender ministers to their emotional demands and grows old alone...
...Irving Bender seems an unlikely hero, it is because he dwells in the midst of poverty-the poverty of faded tradition and of circumstance. Markus dramatizes this familiar condition with a laconic, willfully unliterary style. Her insights possess the character of aphorisms, translated into the sardonic, bantering idiom of immigrant Jews. "A lot you know," is the lesson Irving learns from his mother's death. When he invests in some paintings by an unknown artist who becomes famous, the novelist observes: "No one ever went broke seeing what was right in front of his nose...